Christian Books Research Articles

이승만의 열린 세계관 형성과 옥중 서역(書役)

Syngman Rhee embraced Christianity when he was imprisoned in Hansung Prison. He converted fellow prisoners there, and set up a school and a library to teach them. The prison school and the library were the birthplace of the coexistence of civilization. Rhee enlightened prisoners and expanded his worldview through a large amount of reading. Rhee read Christian books, books on international law, newspapers and magazines, and literary books in prison. Rhee's writing in prison is divided into books and editorials. Rhee's remaining translations and writings in prison are Cheyeok jip (Anthology of Poems Written in Lieu of Physical Labor), Cheong-Il jeon-gi (A History of the Sino-Japanese War), New English-Korean Dictionary, and The Spirit of Independence. Rhee was able to carry out several tasks at the same time because he wrote and translated according to a meticulous plan, and carefully recorded the writing schedule in various places. From February 8, 1902 to August 7, 1904, Rhee also contributed numerous anonymous editorials to the Jeguk sinmun (Imperial Newspaper) and spread the strategy of Joseon's independence to the public based on his open worldview.

Stephanie L. Derrick, Editor: Chasing Paper: Critical Reflections on Christian Books and Publishing

Stephanie L. Derrick, Editor: Chasing Paper: Critical Reflections on Christian Books and Publishing

The Ways that Parted in the Library: The Gospels according to Matthew and according to the Hebrews in Late Ancient Heresiology

This article traces how early Christian thinkers (including Irenaeus, Eusebius, Epiphanius and Jerome) conceptualised ‘Jewishness’ in bibliographic terms. The material that early Christian sources associate with the Gospel according to the Hebrews exhibits a substantial textual relationship with the Gospel according to Matthew. The distinction emerges within a fourth- and fifth-century heresiological project of bibliographic categorisation that seeks to differentiate Jewish and Christian books and readers. Bibliography is a way of distinguishing reading communities and thereby advances the late ancient rhetorical project often known as the parting of the ways between Judaism and Christianity.

Arabic Christianity between the Ottoman Levant and Eastern Europe

Arabic Christianity between the Ottoman Levant and Eastern Europe

Jesus: The apex of biblical canons

This article aims at showing how Jesus is the apex of biblical canons, the authority that grants the status of sacredness to Christian, canonical and biblical books. It uses an intercultural approach involving three cultural frames of reference whereby the Protestant Church leadership will represent a contemporary culture, while the Roman Catholic Church stands for traditional church culture, and Jesus’ authority reflects an original biblical culture. Consequently, the article consists of three parts: the impact of Scripture on the contemporary Protestant Church in Africa, the authority of biblical canon in the Roman Catholic Church and Jesus’ authority in original biblical cultures.Contribution: The article has established that in the biblical cultures, Jesus’ authority is recognised in canonical gospels and in extra canonical writings. In the Catholic Church, this authority is celebrated in the liturgy, expanded from the canonical biblical books and translated into the canon law. In the current Protestant Church in Africa, Jesus’ authority empowers the ministers to significantly impact their audiences.

Ալ. Սպենդիարյանի «Ալմաստ» օպերայի լիբրետոն և Հովհ. Թումանյանի «Թմկաբերդի առումը» պոեմը

Among the works of Hovhannes Tumanyan, Alexander Spendiaryan singled out the poem “The Seizure of Tmkaberd”, in which the poet reflects on the eternal issues of struggle between good and evil, immortality of human deeds and accomplishments, condemnation of betrayal as violation of moral principles – concepts, coming from time immemorial and reflected in sacred Christian books, thoughts, preoccupying both the poet and the composer. Tumanyan, due to his intense busyness, failed to write the libretto for Spendiaryan’s opera Almast. Sofia Parnok wrote it. She was familiar with not only Tumanyan’s works in Russian translation, but also the historical image of Nadir Shah. The translator Tigran Hakhumyan, however, in translating the libretto into Armenian, remained faithful to the language and style of Tumanyan’s text. The main female personage in both the opera Almast and the poem “The Seizure of Tmkaberd” is a betrayer – a character, also present in the folklore and literature of other peoples.

The Development of Arab Christian Book Printing in Lebanon and Syria in the First Half of the 18th Century

The article deals with the history of the emergence of the Arab Renaissance in Lebanon and Syria at the turn of the 17th century and the commencement of Arab Christian book printing that became a driving force in this process. Based on the analysis of scientific, historical, and religious literature, the article reveals the figure of one of the first book printers in the Middle East, Abdallāh Zakher, who invented fonts used in the first Arab Christian books and was the founder of the first printing house in Lebanon, in the town of Chouweir, at the Monastery of St John the Baptist. The author also looks into the Ukrainian contribution to the development of Arab Christian book printing, particularly the release of two publications with support from Ivan Mazepa in Alepo in 1708, namely the titular Tetraevangelion with a foreword of Athanasius III Dabbās, Patriarch of Antioch, devoted to Ivan Mazepa, and the Gospel Book at the expense of Danylo Apostol, Myrhorod Colonel. Keywords: Arab Renaissance Nahda, Arab Christian book printing, Abdallāh Zakher, Mazepa’s Gospel, Danylo Apostol’s titular Gospel Book.

ЛЮДСЬКА ГІДНІСТЬ: ХРИСТИЯНСЬКИЙ ТА СВІТСЬКИЙ АСПЕКТ

The article identifies the features of ideas about human dignity in secular and Christian aspects. Having studied various groups of scientific sources (from Christian books, opinions of classics on human dignity, secular documents to the works of modern Ukrainian philosophers), the concept of «dignity» according to biblical anthropology is analyzed, the realization of human dignity in the Old Testament and New Testament. It is proved that the concept of a dignified human life is embodied in two types: secular and Christian as ideals of social and spiritual activity. Religion does not insist on the idea of the highest social value of the individual, because man is declared dependent on the will of Almighty God, but his principle of equality of all people before God is a kind of assertion of human dignity. The secular understanding of human dignity is based on the fact that man did not come out of nature as a creation of God, but created himself as a subject of labor, as a thinking and moral being.Despite the differences, and sometimes contradictions in the understanding of the essential manifestations of human dignity between secular and Christian contexts, it is obvious for both aspects to understand that the leading place should be occupied by the side of the individual, which manifests itself in her own consciousness and her desire for free self-determination and creativity as a prerequisite for asserting her own dignity.

Unscripted America: Indigenous Languages and the Origins of a Literary Nation by Sarah Rivett

Reviewed by: Unscripted America: Indigenous Languages and the Origins of a Literary Nation by Sarah Rivett Caroline Wigginton (bio) Unscripted America: Indigenous Languages and the Origins of a Literary Nation sarah rivett Oxford University Press, 2017 400 pp. European colonization of North America employed many tactics, including the devaluation and eradication of Indigenous languages. Yet, as Sarah Rivett underscores in the opening pages of her erudite new book Unscripted America, “Indigenous tongues were not simply erased; they were also preserved” (16). Her study recounts the seemingly paradoxical history of language preservation as a strategy of erasure while also seeking to recognize the ways that the “untranslatable aspects of indigenous languages have a disruptive impact on universal truths of either Scripture or Enlightened taxonomies” (11). Colonists’ prolonged immersion in the radically alternative cosmologies apparent in Indigenous languages troubled their beliefs about language, history, place, and culture, and forced white missionaries and natural philosophers to navigate thorny questions about how to translate words and concepts in the absence of established guidance and direct correlation. The introduction presents Rivett’s argument, methodology, and key terms, and then previews the remainder of the book. To make her case and focus her narrative, Rivett homes in on the northeastern portion of North America from roughly the seventeenth century through the mid-nineteenth. This scope builds on her expertise in Protestant theologies, Enlightenment empiricisms, and early New England missions—as showcased in her first book, The Science of the Soul in Colonial New England (Omohundro, 2011)—and enfolds the French, British, and US colonization of Native nations speaking Iroquioan and Algonquian dialects like Mohawk, Wôpanâak, and Lenape. Her methodology, therefore, is explicitly comparative, which here means between Franco-Catholic and Anglo-Protestant practices. She contends that despite “[d]ifferences of theology, colonialism, and imperialism,” “the outcome—specifically the challenges that the untranslatable phrase or concept presented to Christian and Enlightenment universals—was largely commensurate across national and linguistic borders” (6). Because her study ranges across travel narratives, theological and philosophical treatises, natural histories, vocabularies, [End Page 552] dictionaries, hymnals, catechisms, novels, and more—many of which are printed, some of which are in manuscript—her conclusions emerge from a substantial and impressive collection of colonialist writing. The first six chapters address the linguistic discoveries and analyses of temporally coterminus Catholic and Protestant missionizations and demonstrate how they progress more or less in concert. First-generation colonists like Paul Le Jeune in New France with the Montagnais and Roger Williams in New England with the Narragansetts learned Indigenous languages and produced vocabularies and catechisms for white missionaries in order to abet Native proselytization. Then, colonists such as Chrestien Le Clerq (who developed an ideogrammatic system to write Mi’kmaq) and John Eliot (who shepherded the printing of the Bible and other texts in Wôpanâak) promoted the generation of Christian books for Indigenous use and for Europeans interested in linguistics and theology. By mastering and scripting Indigenous languages, white linguists could strip them of their supposed savagery and provide Europeans with the materials to access again the divine truths and origins contained in language but lost, so it was thought, with the Tower of Babel. Third-generation missionaries like Experience Mayhew and Jacques Gravier, who benefited from learning Indigenous languages as children or from their predecessors, shifted away from “attempt[ing] to enfold American Indian languages into Christian cosmologies and scriptural history” (91). Though they contributed to linguistic archives, their interests were often personal, pastoral, and aesthetic, as European scholars on the other side of the Atlantic now understood languages to be autonomous and culturally specific rather than spiritually and historically interconnected. By the early eighteenth century, the European colonial system approached language as part of an interimperial strategy: language was the key to making alliances with Native nations and controlling Indigenous populations inside colonial borders. Missionaries’ knowledge of Indigenous languages served martial and political rivalries because through language one European empire might gain victory over another. Chapters 5 and 6 delve into this final point. Great Awakening Anglo-Protestants like Jonathan Edwards and David Brainerd saw spiritual value in Indigenous languages as tools of conversion and as repositories of imagery and aesthetics that...

기독교 단행본 북디자인의 평가 기준 및 개선에 관한 연구 -시조사 리커버 북디자인 사례를 중심으로-

기독교 단행본 북디자인의 평가 기준 및 개선에 관한 연구 -시조사 리커버 북디자인 사례를 중심으로-

The Torah of the Gospel: A Rabbinic Polemic against The Syro-Roman Lawbook

AbstractIn a famous story in b. Šabb. 116a–b, Imma Shalom and her brother, Rabban Gamaliel, present to a philosopher a dispute concerning the inheritance of the daughter. The judge, having being bribed by Imma Shalom, rules in her favor, against the ruling of the Torah of Moses, arguing that the latter has been abrogated and replaced by the “Torah of the Gospel,” which states that “the son and the daughter inherit equally.” After being bribed by Rabban Gamaliel, the philosopher recants, citing Matt 5:17, where Jesus reaffirms the validity of the Mosaic Law.This article argues that the “Torah of the Gospel” actually refers to The Syro-Roman Lawbook, and that the story is constructed as a response to a radical and new legal supersessionist argument brought forth in this book which is directly linked to the Roman law of equal inheritance. This is the first clear evidence we have that, alongside the New Testament, the Babylonian rabbis also read and engaged directly with Christian books of their time written in Syriac. This has major ramifications on the way we perceive the textual culture of the Babylonian rabbis and their intellectual interactions with East Syrians.

Palaeographic Analysis of Codices from the Early Christian Period: A Point of Method

It is often said that palaeographic analysis of Greek literary manuscripts from the Roman era has progressed from an aesthetic judgment to more of a science, thanks largely to increased data (in the form of newly discovered papyri and parchments from Egypt) and to more sophisticated ways of describing similarity and difference in handwriting. This progress is frequently taken to mean that we may now use the analysis of handwriting to assign dates to undated manuscripts with much greater precision and accuracy than was possible a century ago. This article questions this conclusion by focusing on neglected methodological points that specifically relate to the problem of palaeographic dating of codices, namely the size and character of the corpus of securely datable samples to which the handwriting of undated codices is compared. This problem is especially relevant for early Christian books, the surviving examples of which tend to be copied in the codex format.

Samuel Ajayi Crowther’s Journeys in Christian and Islamic Book History

Abstract Samuel Ajayi Crowther, the Yoruba linguist and Anglican missionary bishop, interacted in the 1870s with communities of multilingual Islamic scholars on the north fringe of Yorubaland. This essay uses contemporary scholarship on the book culture of Ilọrin to shed light on Crowther’s letters, in particular his triumphant account of a formal audience with the emir of Ilọrin in 1872, during which his performance centred on the bilingual collection of Christian books he bore. He emphasized the uniqueness and novelty of his Christian books and their associated practices. Yet his accounts invite us to begin viewing Africa’s Christian and Islamic book histories through the same analytical frame, which reveals how they were constituted in part through their interactions. This allows us to see they had more in common than Crowther assumed and than many scholarly accounts of African book history assume, particularly in the areas of the physicality of books, the modes of performance associated with books, and the interpersonal transactions that books facilitate.

God's Library: The Archeology of the Earliest Christian Manuscripts by Brent Nongbri

Reviewed by: God's Library: The Archeology of the Earliest Christian Manuscripts by Brent Nongbri Claire Clivaz Brent Nongbri God's Library: The Archeology of the Earliest Christian Manuscripts New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018 Pp. xii + 403. $35.00. In God's Library: The Archeology of the Earliest Christian Manuscripts, Brent Nongbri presents an interesting argument. He wishes to "reintroduce the early Christian manuscripts," by establishing "what we are able to know about these manuscripts as archeological artifacts" (14) and by raising "consciousness about how messy and fragmentary our knowledge about these books is" (15). The concrete result of this program is a discussion that formally introduces the early Christian manuscripts, with detailed chapters notably on paleography and codicology, but also that presents a careful and provocative meta-critical analysis of the methodologies used in the field for decades. Consequently, both advanced scholars and young scholars and students will find much of interest in this monograph. The state of the art behind this monograph is presented in the Prologue. Brent Nongbri considers that previous writings have been too focused on a biblical canonical approach (Hurtado), or have put aside the materiality of the artifacts (Gamble). By analyzing the Freer codices as the first example, the Prologue underlines from the beginning of the study a double ascertainment that is applied to all the further examples: dating the manuscripts and knowing their provenances are very difficult tasks, almost impossible to achieve. As regards the Freer codex I, for example, it means that "the most recent assessment of the age of the gospel manuscript concluded that we are simply not in a position to offer a precise date for the codex on the basis of handwriting and closed with a plea for radiocarbon analysis" (5). Chapters One, Two, and Three are focused on general features of the study of ancient Christian books, whereas Chapters Four, Five, Six, and Seven present specific cases. All students and scholars interested in acquiring training in ancient codicology will find an excellent overview of the question in the first informative chapters. For example, Chapter Two gives a clear overview about the fact that "to assign a date to literary papyri of the Roman era [scholars] rely on paleography, the comparative analysis of handwriting" (56). At the same time, Nongbri raises at each step numerous incertitudes and difficulties in this way of dating: "The almost complete absence of datable samples of Greek literary handwriting [End Page 506] before the ninth century meant that opinions about dates of any given manuscript of the Roman era could diverge wildly" (64). For example, P.Duk. inv. 5 has been estimated as a second-, third-, fourth-, or fifth-century document (69). One wonders how scholars will react to this lucid and critical analysis of the field, considering, for example, that Nongbri estimates that "paleography is so subjective and problematic" (72), and that even carbon 14 dating can in the best cases provide only a large scale of years as possible dating (80). In a similarly prudent way, Chapter Three illustrates the extreme difficulty involved in accurately reconstructing where ancient manuscripts were found, through employing the example of the Nag Hammadi codices. The author concludes that "although scholars of early Christianity often speak as if we know the exact circumstances of the discovery of the Nag Hammadi codices, in fact we know only the general area in which locals assert the books were found" (113). The reasons for such difficulties are the involvement of professional and non-professional people at the moment of the discovery, and the divergences of interest between the dealers and the buyers. In some cases, "even scholars all have reasons to be less than forthcoming about the locations of finds" (115). Chapter Four develops the analysis on the Chester Beatty papyri, with a particularly fascinating presentation of the materiality of these codices. Codex Beatty I appears as an "anomalous" document, with very fine pages, which is not easy to use. Very profitably for biblical scholars, Nongbri also exhumes Kenyon's opinions: for example, Codex Beatty I shows for him that "the Vaticanus text represents the result, not of continuous unaltered tradition, but of skilled scholarship working on the best...

A Forgotten Spiritual Practice: Puritan Conference and Implications for the Church Today

In Christian books today readers can find dozens of spiritual practices. One resource of the Protestant tradition, however, that has largely been forgotten is the Puritan practice of conference. This article describes how for the English Puritans conference exemplified the importance of communal spiritual life, then considers applications for the contemporary church. Conference refers to intentional conversation among believers about spiritual matters. Conference particularly expresses the value of Christian community and the need for the body of Christ to function together on the journey of faith. Understanding this practice not only illuminates the past but also offers valuable insights for the church today.

Divine Truth, Presence, and Power: Christian Books in Roman North Africa

The rhetorical significance of sacred books in the North African controversy between Caecilianists and Donatists remains under-explained. In this article, I situate the act of traditio in its historical context by employing insights from the study of material texts. The Acts of the Abitinian Martyrs, the arguments of Augustine and Optatus, and even apotropaic practices reveal a social logic in which the physical book does more than transmit text. I argue that this theology of the book provides a richer account of traditio than the economic and sociological explanations in current scholarship on the North African controversy. The sacred book functions as a metonym for Christian confession, an avatar of divine presence, and a powerful agent of healing. To hand over the sacred books for destruction was thus to destroy objects which embodied divine truth, presence, and power.

The rise of the quotation sign in the Latin West and the changing modes of reading between the sixth and the ninth centuries

The twelve volumes of the Codices latini antiquiores provide a rich trove of data about the earliest methods of citation-marking in the Latin West. This data indicates that citations from the Bible began to be marked in Christian books by the fifth century. Originally, the preferred method of such marking was by indentation of cited material, but in the sixth century, a different method – the use of a special symbol placed in the margin next to the line containing citations – gained a foothold. Several such symbols were used between the fifth and the ninth century in the Latin West, reflecting conventions characteristic of specific regions, scriptoria and scripts. By the end of the eighth century, one such symbol, a vertical flourish resembling the modern letter S, prevailed as a result of its adoption by the users of Caroline minuscule. Carolingian scribes were responsible for uniformization of citation-marking practices in the Latin West and also for their widespread adoption as a book feature so that it can be estimated that more than half of the manuscripts produced in the Carolingian scriptoria were equipped with S-shaped flourishes. The development in the Carolingian period was a culmination of long dynamic development of citation-marking practices in the Latin West, which seem to reflect different reading strategies and attitudes of distinct groups of book users.

Index Librorum Prohibitorum: The Tannaim and Jewish Christian Books: Philological and Historical Perspectives

Index Librorum Prohibitorum: The Tannaim and Jewish Christian Books: Philological and Historical Perspectives

Finding Early Christian Books at Nag Hammadi and Beyond

This essay responds to two recent articles on the discovery of the Nag Hammadi codices, one by Mark Goodacre and another by Nicola Denzey Lewis and Justine Ariel Blount.

Kodex und Kanon: Das Buch im frühen Christentum by Martin Wallraff (review)

Reviewed by: Kodex und Kanon: Das Buch im frühen Christentum by Martin Wallraff Brent Nongbri Martin Wallraff Kodex und Kanon: Das Buch im frühen Christentum Hans-Lietzmann-Vorlesungen 12 Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2013 Pp. xv + 78. $28.00. This slim volume presents the 2010 Hans Lietzmann Lecture delivered by Martin Wallraff. A foreword by Christoph Markschies (series editor) introduces the lecture series and provides a brief biography and bibliography of Wallraff. The book’s subject matter, the place of the codex in early Christian culture, has had no shortage of attention in recent years, having been addressed in monographs by historians, biblical scholars, and papyrologists. Yet, Wallraff’s treatment of the topic is often innovative and always insightful. The book is divided into six sections. The first (“Medienhistorische Vorüberlegungen”) situates the discussion in terms of media history, noting that in our present moment of flux between print and digital media, we may be especially well placed to see previously neglected aspects of the shift from roll to codex that coincided with the first centuries of the Christian era. The second section (“Der Kodex im frühen Christentum”) begins by presenting data and charts derived from the Leuven Database of Ancient Books to demonstrate the early Christian preference for the codex format over the roll. Noting that attempts to explain this preference have inspired sober minds to “erstaunlicher Hypothesenfreudigkeit” (16), Wallraff argues that probably no single reason accounts for the Christian preference for the codex, but rather a combination of reasons, and he raises the possibility that Christians tended to produce their literature in codex format because it was not regarded as sacred. As is well known, for the earliest followers of Jesus, the “scriptures” were texts of the Hebrew Bible, which were characteristically produced in rolls. This suggestion is intriguing, but Wallraff does not account for identifiably Christian copies of Septuagint texts in codex form that have been assigned quite early dates. [End Page 480] The third section (“Der Kanon im frühen Christentum”) offers a fascinating overview of evidence that has been neglected in discussions of the development of the Christian canon, beginning with term itself. Wallraff notes that in addition to its oft-cited definition as “a measure” or “rule,” kanōn also could mean “table” or “synopsis.” This observation leads to an illuminating discussion of “canons” (i.e., tables) from antiquity, such as Ptolemy’s astronomical tables, followed by a more detailed discussion of the use of tables by Eusebius of Caesarea. Wallraff first directs attention to the use of parallel columns in Eusebius’s Chronicon before turning to his Canons of the Psalms and Canons of the Gospels, which function essentially as indices for these works and presuppose the codex format. The fourth section (“Der spätantike Buch als Gesamtkunstwerk”) opens by pointing out that very few complete Bibles survive from antiquity, and there is no good reason to think very many more were produced. Here Wallraff sensibly dissents from the view that Eusebius (Vit. Const. 4.36) unquestionably refers to the production of complete Bibles. Thus, the notion of “canon” as authoritative text was much more an ideal list than a material reality. Yet, even if complete Bibles were rarer than we may have imagined, the codex was still a crucial part of elite Christian sensibilities. In this regard, Wallraff returns to Eusebius’s canon tables, pointing out that they were likely the earliest truly illuminated manuscripts. The originals, of course, do not survive, but because of the consistent layout and decorations on the extant manuscripts (similar scenes of Jesus’ birth, baptism, and resurrection), it is reasonable to conclude that they give evidence of an earlier prototype. The fifth section (“Performative Valenz der Buches”) explores the role of Christian books beyond the acts of writing and reading. Wallraff notes the central place of books as objects of veneration in church councils, as carriers of miraculous power, and, according to a colophon in the late twelfth-century Lemberger gospels, as the physical manifestation of the body of Jesus. These observations make for a smooth transition to the final section, “Ausblick: Kodex und Koran.” Wallraff here explores a number of interesting tensions surrounding...